Mother dishes on ATO’s Joshua

A piece in this week’s New Yorker provides an interesting back-story to our recent coverage of ATO Pictures’ success at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Deborah Copaken Kogan, the mother of 9-year-old actorJacob Kogan, who plays the lead role in the Dave Matthews/Coran Capshaw-produced film Joshua, writes a personal history of her young son’s involvement in the film and what it was like to accompany him to Sundance, where Joshua was received with raves and picked up by Fox Searchlight Pictures for $4 million.

Kogan, who was pregnant while Joshua was being filmed, describes getting a call on her cell phone from one of ATO’s producers only a few hours after giving birth, saying they needed a new baby to play the role of Lily in the film.

"But I’m in the hospital," says Kogan.

"I know," says the producer, butÂ claims the youngest infants he could find were three months old.

Of course, Kogan refuses, citing the obvious, but after a call from her son pleading with her, she swaddles her new baby and takes him down to the fake hospital set where he plays a little baby girl just being born to her son’s parents in the film.

In another scene at Sundance, Kogan and her son are told to wait outside at an after screening party (Jacob can’t actually attend the party because he's underage, despite being the movie’s star) for Dave Matthews to show up because the Wall Street JournalWeekend Edition, who's sponsoring the party, needs a photo of Matthews (who Kogan describes as writing a song for the movie, apparently unaware of his ATO connection) and Jacob in front of a Wall Street Journal logo. When Matthews shows up, he's mobbed by fans, and Kogan describes the moment as one where her son gets his first glimpse at what celebrity might be like.

1 comment

TheyCollardtheGuy March 8th, 2007 | 1:53am

That sounds like an article worth reading. Too bad the New Yorker doesn't seem to have it online...